No Arabic abstract
Supersymmetry is assumed to be a basic symmetry of the world in many high energy theories, but none of the super partners of any known elementary particle has been observed yet. We argue that supersymmetry can also be realized and studied in ultracold atomic systems with a mixture of bosons and fermions, with properly tuned interactions and single particle dispersion. We further show that in such non-releativistic systems supersymmetry is either spontaneously broken, or explicitly broken by a chemical potential difference between the bosons and fermions. In both cases the system supports a sharp fermionic collective mode or the so-called Goldstino, due to supersymmetry. We also discuss possible ways to detect the Goldstino mode experimentally.
Using quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we study a mixture of bosons and fermions loaded on an optical lattice. With simple on-site repulsive interactions, this system can be driven into a solid phase. We dope this phase and, in analogy with pure bosonic systems, identify the conditions under which the bosons enter a supersolid phase, i.e., exhibiting at the same time charge density wave and superfluid order. We perform finite size scaling analysis to confirm the presence of a supersolid phase and discuss its properties, showing that it is a collective phase that also involve phase coherence of the fermions.
We theoretically investigate a supersymmetric collective mode called Goldstino in a Bose-Fermi mixture. The explicit supersymmetry breaking, which is unavoidable in cold atom experiments, is considered. We derive the Gell-Mann--Oakes-Renner (GOR) relation for the Goldstino, which gives the relation between the energy gap at the zero momentum and the explicit breaking term. We also numerically evaluate the gap of Goldstino above the Bose-Einstein condensation temperature within the random phase approximation (RPA). While the gap obtained from the GOR relation coincides with that in the RPA for the mass-balanced system, there is a deviation from the GOR relation in the mass-imbalanced system. We point out the deviation becomes large when the Goldstino pole is close to the branch point, although it is parametrically a higher order with respect to the mass-imbalanced parameter. To examine the existence of the goldstino pole in realistic cold atomic systems, we show how the mass-imbalance effect appears in $^6$Li-$^7$Li, $^{40}$K-$^{41}$K, and $^{173}$Yb-$^{174}$Yb mixtures. Furthermore, we analyze the Goldstino spectral weight in a $^{173}$Yb-$^{174}$Yb mixture with realistic interactions and show a clear peak due to the Goldstino pole. As a possibility to observe the Goldstino spectrum in cold atom experiments, we discuss the effects of the Goldstino pole on the fermionic single-particle excitation as well as the relationship between the GOR relation and Tans contact.
It is well known that bosons on an optical lattice undergo a second-order superfluid-insulator transition (SIT) when the lattice potential increases. In this paper we study SIT when fermions coexist with the bosons. We find that the critical properties of particle-hole symmetric SIT with dynamical exponent z=1 is modified when fermions are present; it either becomes a fluctuation-driven first order transition or a different second-order transition. On the other hand the more generic particle-hole asymmetric (with z=2) SIT is stable against coupling with fermions. We also discuss pairing interaction between fermions mediated by quantum critical fluctuations near SIT.
We present a detailed study of the population imbalanced three-component Hubbard chain with attractive interactions. Such a system can be realized experimentally with three different hyperfine states of ultra cold $^6$Li atoms in an optical lattice. We find that there are different phases that compete with each other in this system: A molecular superfluid phase in which the three fermion species pair up to form molecules (trions), a usual pairing phase involving two species with exactly opposite momenta, and a more exotic generalized Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase consisting of three competing pairing tendencies with different non-zero center-of-mass momenta. At large attractive interactions the system exhibits strong tendencies towards collapse and phase separation. Employing the density-matrix-renormalization-group-method (DMRG) to determine the decay exponents of the various correlators we establish the phase diagram of this model for different fillings and interactions. We also discuss the experimentally relevant situation in a trap and report the existence of an additional region where two species are dynamically balanced.
We use kinetic theory to model the dynamics of a small Bose condensed cloud of heavy particles moving through a larger degenerate Fermi gas of light particles. Varying the Bose-Fermi interaction, we find a crossover between bulk and surface dominated regimes -- where scattering occurs throughout the Bose cloud, or solely on the surface. We calculate the damping and frequency shift of the dipole mode in a harmonic trap as a function of the magnetic field controlling an inter-species Feshbach resonance. We find excellent agreement between our stochastic model and the experimental studies of Cs-Li mixtures.